In this week's KDE Commit-Digest: Solid gets support for NetworkManager. Support for changing the font colour of the taskbar. File format import work in KVocTrain. More KDE 4 porting takes place in KTorrent. Noatun now uses Phonon as its only backend. Work is begun on refactoring the user interface of Amarok 2.0. The Codeine video player is imported into KDE SVN and ported to CMake, Phonon and KDE 4. Progress in the 'krunner' element of Plasma. KAlgebra is imported into KDE SVN into the playground/edu module. Search improvements in Kate, with a move to the kdesdk module.

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the "tv comercial" thing was like a goal for this music not a real target
I hope we can get a tv comercial, but the musick is prety good to be used in all sorts of way in kde, there will be more versions of it so we can make full usage of the theme.

Tikiwiki is the only reason I stay away from wiki.kde.org as much as I can. It's really a shame that one of the most popular open source project has a wiki that is, to be kind, a mess.
Why can't we have a decent one just because a self-proclaimed admin don't allow to explore other options? How about a poll here on the dot? [/rant]

Oh dear god do I ever agree with you. I can't count how many times I've double clicked on a word in that wiki to select it and that stupid thing thinks I want to edit the page, and then warns me with a popup that the page is being edited by anonymous. Probably some other poor sod that accidentally clicked the page.

> It's really a shame that one of the most popular open source project has a wiki that is, to be kind, a mess.
Hey, it's only the user wiki, developers have a cool one... but yeah.

> Why can't we have a decent one just because a self-proclaimed admin don't allow to explore other options?
1. Are you offering your services as a committed admin of a MediaWikified wiki.kde.org? If no, you argument doesn't hold.
2. He says migrating the user database and complete history to MediaWiki is entirely too timeconsuming and that he'd rather improve our TikiWiki installation than go through the producedure. He's open to suggestions in channel #kde-wiki but he doesn't seem to have much time.

> How about a poll here on the dot?
Again, a poll is useless as there's no one to admin a KDE user MediaWiki.

techbase is a(n eventual) replacement for developer.kde.org, kde.org/areas/sysadmin and other related web pages. techbase is a wiki, but it is not analogous to wiki.kde.org.

techbase is specifically, stricly and only for technical information of interest to developers (community and ISV), sysadmins and system integrators. it is there to drive kde development internally as well as provide resources external parties.

quality, organization and coverage are all high priorities. wiki.kde.org is a bit more of a free-for-all when it comes to these sorts of things. while community involvement in techbase is encouraged and supported (that's why it's a wiki, for instance) the techbase team actually does maintain the content and structure.

> although it would be even better if it filled the whole browser width.

False.

No seriously. I agree on pages with a fixed height. This is line a stamp, really annoying. A maximum width on the other hand is actually good design. The paragraph length remains consistent, the number of words at one line can be optimized for best readability.

Everyone who've used Latex probably knows about this. There are in fact scientific studies how large a page margin and line width should be. Open any academic book and you'll notice the large margin space, and number of words at one line. Sites with a good width are easier to read _if and only if_ the width is in "em" so it scales with the font size.

> The paragraph length remains consistent, the number of words at one
> line can be optimized for best readability.

Unfortunately, unlike TeX, this is impossible with HTML with different DPIs and such for each screen. Second, HTML is suppost to be dynamic and personal. I like more words on a line with slightly more linespacing. Which is impossible with that layout.

Fortunately, if you create an account, you can alter your default style on techbase to be the normal media wiki style. Makes things readable for me again :)

heh. "no, really, my brain works differently than the rest of the species" ;)

as for websvn, i totally agree. that application needs a non-fixed design. text content (e.g. articles and tutorials) benefit from it, but not web apps like websvn or lxr. hopefully we get that addressed at some point in the near-ish future.

Yes and no. Any screenshots will still show the old KDE 3.x styles, icons, themes, etc. and mostly the same applications. Kicker, for instance, looks the same but only half works (it's going to die as plasma ramps up) and the desktop doesn't even get drawn at this point.

So not much to see visually, except that the libraries and applications are steadily improving. For example, khtml now has full (or nearly) CSS 3 support :)

When plasma comes online, and the new windecos, widget styles and icons all go online, you will get to see the visual differences. When kwin_composite comes online, we'll probably need videos though, as the animations are very difficult to capture in images :)

there are *some* and incomplete and unfinished etc etc screenshots in my kde 4 presentation which are available at http://www.kde.org/kdeslides/ which will be mentioned in the next daily fosdem report.

At first, I disliked Oxygen icons *a lot*. It was too much plain and boring. But recently they where under some cosmetic changes and I'm really starting to think it will rock big time, and plus, will have a nice uniform looking for most of it's icons.

I'd really LOVE to have the underlined letter in every menu or button hidden by defalt and shown only when one presses the alt key, just like in Windows. It really gives a "cleaner" feeling.
Is it possible to do it without having to patch Qt?

I'd really LOVE to have the underlined letter in every menu
or button not hidden by defalt, just like in Windows 3.1/95/NT.
It really gives a more pleasant experience of deciding which
shortcut to press with only a glance.

At last, great to see some news about plasma. Few months back there was a roadmap page in plasma's website. Where is it go now? At least it is not visible in the menu. Would like to see more coverage about plasma project. Anyway great going KDE team =)

Plasma will get more coverage when things are ready to be covered. Mostly libraries stuff happening anyway at this point...

The problem with plasma is that it's hard to make the full switchover from kicker to plasma before plasma starts to approach kicker's level of functionality. And without that switchover in place, less people within KDE are exposed to the plasma code (as they don't get urges to implement things)... so once it hits a certain point and can realistically take over for kicker, then you'll see development accelerate quite rapidly.

(also note that much of plasma's design is centred around making it easy to extend by third parties... so the good extensions would not necessarily be around for 4.0 yet, but will probably start to pop up after 4.0 and people have had a chance to do new things with it. But coding this infrastructure is a lot of work and is taking up much of the plasma design time.)